Detecting Infrared Maritime Targets Overwhelmed in Sun Glitters by Antijitter Spatiotemporal Saliency

When detecting infrared maritime targets on sunny days, strong sun glitters can lower the detection accuracy tremendously. To this problem, we proposed a robust antijitter spatiotemporal saliency generation with parallel binarization (ASSGPB) method. Its main contribution is to facilitate to improve the infrared maritime target detection accuracy in this situation. The ASSGPB algorithm exploits the target's spatial saliency and temporal consistency to separate real targets from clutter areas. The ASSGPB first corrects image intensity distribution with a central inhibition difference of Gaussian filter. Then, a self-defined spatiotemporal saliency map (STSM) generator is used to generate an STSM in five consecutive frames while compensating interframe jitters by a joint block matching. Finally, a parallel binarization method is adopted to segment real targets in STSM while keeping full target areas. To evaluate the performance of ASSGPB, we captured eight different image sequences (20420 frames in total) that were significantly contaminated by strong sun glitters. The ASSGPB realized 100% detection rate and 0.45% false alarm rate in these data sets, greatly outperforming four state-of-the-art algorithms. Thus, a great applicability of ASSGPB has been verified through our experiments.